VP Dhankar questions ‘confrontational stance on languages’ amid row over NEP

Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar on Sunday stressed the importance of nurturing India’s linguistic diversity and questioned whether “there should be a confrontational stance on languages in the land of Bharat”.

Addressing the students and faculty of the Indian Insitute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad on Sunday, Dhankar said Indian languages are a “gold mine of literature” with “classical texts such as the Vedas, Puranas, our epics, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Gita serving as testaments to their significance”.

His comments come amid the Tamil Nadu government’s opposition to the National Education Policy (NEP)’s three-language formula, which includes Hindi. Chief minister MK Stalin had asserted that forced Hindi adoption has “swallowed” 25 North Indian languages and called it a “deliberate attempt to erase linguistic diversity”.

The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader said more than 25 north Indian native languages had been “destroyed by the invasion of hegemonic Hindi-Sanskrit languages”. “The century-old Dravidian movement safeguarded Tamil and its culture because of the awareness it created and the various agitations,” he said.

While the central government argues that the NEP aims to create a more inclusive and multilingual society, opposition voices, particularly from Tamil Nadu, see it as an effort to impose Hindi at the cost of regional languages.

Dhankar said India should take pride in its recognition of classical languages and make efforts to nurture them, highlighting their global outreach and deep knowledge base.

Stressing India’s rich linguistic heritage, he said, “Even in Parliament, simultaneous translation takes place in 22 languages.”

He also stressed the role of alumni in building a robust educational system, and the need for corporate India to step up its investment in research and development to compete on a global scale.